


And Lost Boys Fly

by hauntedlittledoll



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-08 02:09:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1922742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedlittledoll/pseuds/hauntedlittledoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce’s children are different; his children will never leave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dick Grayson

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)" by the Dixie Chicks.

It started with a stuffed elephant in the backseat.

Bruce didn’t put it in the passenger seat next to him.  No, the man placed it as carefully in the backseat as any other new parent.  At red lights, he found his eyes drawn to the toy in his rearview mirror.

It was such a silly childish treasure.  The poorly-proportioned elephant listed to one side.  Half of the creature had been crafted from blue satin that had once been a stage costume.  The other half was a recycled sweater—cheap, machine-knit gray wool.  Mismatched button eyes and a ruffled collar gave the creature a personality and a name.

Well-worn.  Well-loved.

It was a treasure and those superstitious idiots had almost _burnt_ it.

Bruce carried the stuffed animal into the manor.  He could smell Alfred’s cooking, but dinner would have to wait.  Bruce headed for his study instead.  He surveyed the quiet room for a long moment, and finally decided on the chairs opposite his desk.  They were just as silly as the stuffed animal—visitors’ chairs for a room that saw no visitors.

He placed the elephant in the one to the right where he could see it while working on his computer, and patted the toy fondly on the head as he checked the corners of the room.

“Dick,” he called out softly.  “You can come out now.  You’re safe here.”

The ghost flickered into existence just out of reach.  He was so small with tousled dark hair, wide blue eyes, and tiny hands that worried the hem of his sweater as he took in his new surroundings.

“Promise?” he asked, his voice just as small.

Bruce crouched to the child’s level.  “I promise.”

Dick launched himself into Bruce’s open arms with a broken sob.  Bruce clutched the frightened little boy close, ignoring the ice cold nose pressed against his neck in favour of the security of a child’s weight in his arms.

Bruce had been studying paranormal phenomena for over fifteen years, and he had never met another ghost like Dick Grayson … a spirit that could touch the living so easily.  Dick didn’t need the fuel of anger driving him or desperation to impact his surroundings.

It was different.  Unique.  Unheard of.

“Shush,” Bruce murmured into the boy’s hair, rubbing gentle circles over Dick’s back as he rocked his newfound charge back and forth.  “I’ve got you now.  I’ve got you.”

Bruce had been in the audience when the fatal fall occurred.  He watched with thousands of other horrified eyes as the weight of three acrobats snapped the trapeze wire.  Later, he would read in the newspaper of sabotage and an extortion racket, but in that horrifying moment, Bruce only knew of the slow motion tragedy before him.

He had watched as John Grayson—in that horrible split second before the snap—twisted.  He had watched as the acrobat’s powerful body used leverage and momentum and _instinct_ to toss the couple’s only son in the direction of the empty swing.

For a moment, Bruce almost thought that the boy would make it, but the broken trapeze was already falling and even a few degrees were ugly, costly things when it came to trajectory.

The only consolation was that John Grayson had been most assuredly dead before his boy hit the ground only a few feet away.

It was a lifetime’s obsession with the supernatural world—an obsession fueled by personal tragedy of his own—that allowed Bruce to gaze into the blue eyes of a child hiding under the stands as the police cordoned off the scene.  He had spent most of his adolescence and early adulthood looking for ghosts, and Bruce quietly approached the small acrobat without fear.

As he suspected, Dick was on his own.  Children were always less likely to move on than adults.

Bruce felt the same profound disappointment now that had coloured the loss of his own parents.  For whatever reason, the Waynes had not returned to their son in ghostly form, and now here was another little boy—dead, but orphaned all the same.

Sitting with Dick until dawn had seemed a small enough thing, although Bruce was surprised to feel the child’s head come to a rest against his side.  Ghosts had some tangible presence, but their connection to the world was rarely as strong or as simple as this child’s touch.

Intrigued, Bruce had followed up on the circus ghost, and the man considered himself fortunate to have been in time … to have succeeded in saving Dick from those amateur ghost hunters.

Bruce had run into them before; foolish men who watched too much TV and made money off the superstitious or frightened.  Burning a ghost’s link to the world was without a doubt the most permanent solution to a haunting, but to use such a barbaric method on a child that had never harmed anyone … no, Bruce couldn’t allow it.

He took the toy—and by extension, the boy—home with him.

“I’ve got you,” Bruce promised the child in his arms, “and you can stay as long as you need.


	2. Barbara Gordon

The first time that Bruce actually saw Barbara, she was sitting in his chair with her arms wrapped around her knees and the sun glinting off her red hair.

His first thought was that they had come such a long, long way from the childish threat on his monitor screen.

_“I’m telling Daddy.”_

Even with six years of being thirteen under her belt, Barbara was still a child.

She wasn’t like Dick.  She hadn’t even manifested visibly until now.  Through the wonder of the world-wide web, Barbara could go anywhere, do anything.  She didn’t need to touch to make her anger known; the girl didn’t want to be saved … but she was still a very young, very angry child.

His leather chair dwarfed her tightly-curled frame.  The photograph on her father’s desk had showed the lanky effects of a recent growth spurt, but the Barbara in Bruce’s chair was closed up tightly as she contemplated some inner mystery.

He was reluctant to enter—half-afraid that the least movement might startle Barbara into disappearing—but he forced such thoughts aside.  It wasn’t his call; it was Barbara’s choice to be seen or not.

“That’s my chair,” he commented lightly, crossing the room.  He held his breath, but the ghost remained where she was.

“Move your feet, lose your seat,” the redhead flicked a quick glance upwards.  Her smile was just as fast, and then the girl looked away again with a one-armed shrug.

“So I’ve heard,” Bruce raised one eyebrow in an uncanny imitation of his butler as he took the empty visitor’s chair.  “From Dick, actually.”

“Dick’s a sweetheart,” Barbara countered.

Bruce chuckled.  “He would love to hear that.”

The smile returned, just barely teasing at the corners of the girl’s mouth.  “I wouldn’t want him to get a big head.”

Bruce hummed in acknowledgement, and propped one arm up to support his chin as he regarded his newest ward.

“Why today?”

When the silence stretched on too long to be comfortable, Bruce reached across the desk to take her hand in his.  The cold fingers slid right through his grasp, and Barbara didn’t even try to return the attempted gesture.  Bruce withdrew and sat back in his seat.

“It’s nice to see you, Barbara, and to hear the sound of your voice … but you don’t have to take this form unless you want to.  I don’t mind conversing with you through the computer.”

He had solved the mystery that way, working in tandem with the cyber-bound ghost and eventually the police commissioner until he could rescue the jump-drive that tethered the girl to the world.  It had been kept locked away as a ghoulish trophy, but Bruce left it plugged in to the computer tower.  Barbara’s freedom was important to her.

Her safety and security were equally important to Bruce.

“No one was listening before,” she informed him, sharp and sudden and pained.  “I tried, but no one would listen.”

“I’m listening,” Bruce told her quietly as if he didn’t already know what her younger brother had done.  As if she didn’t _know_ that he knew what her brother had done.  As if  Commissioner Gordon’s sense of guilt didn’t weigh heavily on them both.  “I’m listening, Barbara.  You can tell me anything.”

Barbara took him up on the invitation, dropping one leg to sit more naturally in the chair sprawled like any other teenager as lines of text began to fill the empty monitor.

Bruce moved a little closer, angling the screen so that they could both see.

She had a lot to say, but Barbara didn’t fade from view.  She stayed in his chair, bright, strong, and unstoppable.


	3. Jason Todd

It was because of Barbara that Gordon approached Bruce about Jason Todd.

It was not the first time that Bruce had spoken with the police commissioner regarding the teenage pick-pocket and tire thief, but it was Jason’s death at the hands of an escaped mass murderer that had landed him in police custody this time around.

While the majority of men and women under Gordon did not believe in ghosts, they were understandably sensitive to unexplainable activity in the bullpen after Barbara’s antics.  When locks didn’t stay locked and coffee mugs shattered against walls, Gordon brought Bruce in to find the boy’s keystone.

The teenager sat across from him—sprawled actually with booted feet up on the table and hands folded behind his head—the entire time that Bruce sorted grimly through the evidence locker.

It was a long process to go through the crates brought back from the crime scene.  The Joker had followed the homeless boy back to his nest and most of Jason’s worldly possessions had been destroyed in the struggle.  Those tattered remains were somehow linking the boy to the department, and there was no exact science to what kind of object a spirit might attach itself to.

Keystones tended to be of sentimental value, but sometimes people assigned an ugly significance to a convenient object.  Children tended to find soft objects the most comforting, but there was no guarantee that a ghost wanted to be comforted.

Bruce had Barbara to thank for those exceptions.

So Bruce worked his way through the bins and bags with careful dedication and gloved hands.  The secondhand paperbacks were stained with coffee; spines were broken, pages ripped out, and the dog-eared corners still spoke of their importance to the teenager across from him.

Handling the books did not earn any kind of reaction from the angry spirit, however, and Bruce stacked the ruined books neatly before turning to a broken Walkman.  And then a Swiss army knife.  And a package of cigarettes.

He hated to pick up the crowbar.  Even after the forensics lab took its blood and hair samples from the murder weapon, it was a filthy tool.  Thankfully, Jason only rolled his eyes when Bruce held it up in silent question.

The red hoodie folded and bagged at the bottom got a response though.

“That’s mine!”

The chair rocked forward as boots came down and Jason lunged for the sweatshirt.  His hands passed right through it and through Bruce too for good measure.  Jason wasn’t Dick; he could learn control someday, but for now the teenager was too new, too distraught, too angry in an abstract, painful way that Bruce understood intimately.

Bruce looked from the sweatshirt to the boy and back again.  It was stretched out and too small for Jason’s lanky frame even so.  Like the crowbar, the material was bloodstained and permeated with the stench of cigarettes as an added bonus.

Bruce looked at Jason once more: “Would you like to come home with me, Jason?”

He should have made that offer two years ago when the teenager first stole the tires right off his limo.  Two years ago, Jason was alive.  Two years ago, he had a chance.

Jason bristled, but then the teen’s shoulders fall in a careless slump as he curled in on himself.

Bruce thought of all the ways that Jason Todd had crammed himself into the spaces he had been allotted.  He thought about the way that the boy could look so small when he might have stood eye-to-eye with Bruce if he had lived long enough to become a man.  He thought—as Jason was surely thinking—about the over-crowded evidence locker, the frantic pace of the station above, and even the cells where they both had some history as stupid, thoughtless teenagers.

Bruce would have laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder if Jason was solid enough to take comfort in it.  Instead, he waited patiently with the evidence bag as carefully cradled in his hands as Dick’s stuffed elephant.  As Barbara’s jump-drive.

Jason didn’t meet his eyes when he finally mumbled an answer.  “Yeah.  Okay, I guess.  Anything’s better than here.”

Bruce wasn’t offended.  He removed the sweatshirt from its bag, draping it over one arm as he picked up after himself.  He didn’t sign-out of the evidence locker; had never signed-in in the first place.  No one would be looking too closely at the open-shut case as far as the Joker was concerned.  Jason Todd was just another number, and Bruce found himself sharing a world-weary nod with Gordon as he let himself out.

If the missing evidence was ever discovered (which it wouldn’t be; this was Gotham and the Joker and a child no one wanted and it was an ugly reality that they lived in this city), Gordon would take the blame.

Just another number.

They were too late, but at least the boy would be safe now and keeping children safe was why they had gotten in their respective businesses to begin with.


	4. Tim Drake

Tim was a stolen child.

It had taken Bruce almost an entire year to make up his mind and take the proper actions, but he couldn’t back out after breaking into that empty little house.

It had been stale and dusty inside; the Drakes could not keep a housekeeper after the accident and as archaeologists, the couple was seldom home from their travels.

Tim had been waiting for him at the door.

The tween was thin, awkward, and a little bit nervous as he welcomed Bruce inside—not skittish, but awestruck.  “Tim,” he had fumbled, almost bouncing at the sight of a human being—any human being—in his home.  “I’m Tim, Mr. Wayne.  How do you do?”

Bruce regarded him with wistful amusement.  He wanted to scoop the boy up like he did Dick, wanted to take him out of this empty place and carry him back to the Manor.  He wanted to give Tim a home where Dick’s laughter echoed in the halls and the scent of Alfred’s baking wafted up from the kitchen, a home where Barbara’s red hair flashed in the sunlight and Jason could always be found curled up in a corner or sprawled out over the floor with his books.  Bruce wanted to see what kind of noise Tim might add to their home once there was someone to hear him.

He didn’t.  Twelve was not ten.  Tim was not Dick, and Bruce still had to find the object that linked the child to this world.  So he very carefully held out his hand and waited.  With some concentration, Tim was able to grasp it—not in the childish, trusting way that Dick sometimes seized Bruce’s hand to lead him this way or that—but in a firm, almost grown-up handshake.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Tim.  I’m sorry that I took so long.”

“It’s okay,” Tim nodded, his forgiveness cheap.  “I knew someone would come.”

Bruce felt ashamed of himself for not having come sooner.  He had tried to reason that Tim’s death had been accidental.  He had argued that Tim didn’t need him the way that the others did.  He had tried to justify the decision—so sure that the Drakes would return and actually stay with their child now … even if it was only out of guilt.

Just an accident, Bruce reminded himself now as he watched the gangly not-quite teenager.  Tim had slipped and fallen while getting ready for school, hitting his head and drowning in the shower while his parents were on yet another business trip.  The housekeeper had been running late that morning, no one answered the school’s call regarding Tim’s absence, and the water damage had been tremendous by the time he was discovered.  It was just a horrible accident that led to a lonely ghost.

Bruce rubbed a hand over the boy’s hair and after a minute, Tim was solid enough to feel it.  Bruce let the hand fall to Tim’s shoulder and turned to the staircase.  “Let’s get you out of here, Tim.”

It wasn’t as simple as it sounded.  Bruce struggled to identify anything that Tim might have attached himself to.  The teen’s bedroom had been emptied, and all of his belongings donated to the appropriate charities.  There was no trace of the accident in the renovated bathroom, and if Bruce didn’t know better, he would say that there was no evidence the Drakes had a son at all.

It was only after explaining to Tim what he was looking for that the boy could lead Bruce back to the entry way and a very old, very expensive vase displayed on the side table.  Bruce studied the antique, considered the boy waiting patiently, and finally rotated the vase to display a Y-shaped crack.  The lines were spider-thin, but not invisible.

“I bumped into the table once when I was little,” Tim confessed with a soft smile.  “And I didn’t want Dad to find out, so I tried to fix it with superglue.  When that didn’t work, I turned it around so that they wouldn’t see what I did.”  The smile widened a little as if Bruce is a fellow conspirator.  “They never noticed.”

Bruce compressed his mouth into a line almost as fine as the crack in the vase.

“Breaking and entering, supernatural kidnapping, and now burglary,” he muttered to himself as the man packed the fragile object with dishtowels and curtains for the ride home.  “Alfred will be so proud.”

_(Tim’s contribution to the manor is the sound of feet sprinting down the hall and jumping down stairs two or three at a time.  Tim steals books from Jason, making the older teenager chase him through the Manor to get them back, and Alfred is—as always—so, so proud.)_


	5. Cassandra Cain

The little girl perched in the top tier of the fountain was just barely visible.

Bruce craned his neck and put a hand up to shield his vision from the sunlight.  It did not improve matters much; the ghost was nigh-transparent with the slightest of shadows outlining her form.

"Will you please come down?

She stared down at him impassively, drumming her fingers idly against the lip of the fountain.  The breeze catches in her hair and sends light and shadow in unpredictable ripples.

Not much to her, and Bruce worried about how long she had been outside …

… because there was a _reason_ most ghosts haunted buildings.  Something about the infinite space of the outside world was daunting to a creature not-entirely present to begin with.  Ghosts left to haunt a road or field deteriorated quickly in both form and temperament as if they could actually be eroded by the elements.

Bruce suspected that it might be related to the tether’s condition, but he wasn’t about to experiment with the ones in his care.

He sighed and dropped his hand in favor of crossing both arms.  It was a good, solid position of authority; unfortunately this child looked no more convinced than any of Bruce’s own.

"You scared people back there," Bruce lectured, raising an eyebrow in imitation of his butler.  "It’s dangerous to play in the street."

The ghost girl promptly ducked her head.

He was beginning to draw strange looks from other park-goers.  Bruce ignored them and held his ground.  He would not give in to the paternal impulse to wade in and bodily remove the child from the fountain. 

Right now, he was a crazy man who talked to fountains.  In a moment, he would be the crazy man in the fountain, and _then_ law enforcement would be summoned.

Jim would be so disappointed.  Again.

"I am not going away, young lady," Bruce informed his audience sternly, as he started to survey the surrounding area for anything that might tether a child to the park.

He just hopes that it isn’t the fountain itself; the City Council is not always as accommodating about relocated landmarks as they could be.

Very cautiously, she peered over the edge.  Her mouth was tucked into a disapproving frown as she made a firm shooing motion with one hand.

Alfred was going to love her.


	6. Stephanie Brown

One moment, Bruce was dodging the unwanted attention of devoted medical personnel and the next, there was a blonde teenager slumped in the chair beside him.

"Mock me at your peril, Masked Man," she announced bitterly, keeping her eyes trained on the infomercial.

"Masked man?" Bruce repeated, checking over his shoulder to make sure that the receptionist was still on the phone.

The ghost gave him a skeptical look and swept one cold finger through the carefully applied discoloration around his eye—Bruce had always been good with a make-up brush.

He shrugged.  “I heard your story,” Bruce admitted.  He had started watching the papers and the news after Tim.  No one knew why children were less likely to move on than adults, but Bruce couldn’t just leave the victims of the phenomena to struggle through on their own.

"Didn’t tell them everything," the girl intoned solemnly.  "Bled out right here.  Let that be an example to you, young Gothamites."

Clearly, she had caught a few of the same news broadcasts on the waiting room television.

Bruce must have been silent for too long, because his companion shifted irritably, slouching deeper in her chair.  “What do you want, Mister?”

"I thought that maybe I could get you home again," he admitted.  "I do that sometimes—relocate ghosts."

The blonde laughed out loud.  “I can’t go home.  Don’t want to go home.  My dad’s in jail, and my mom’s … well, she’s got a problem.  I love her, but I don’t know if she’ll have the nerve to report me missing.  Or if she’s noticed that I’m actually missing and not just …”  She made a dismissive gesture.  “Look, I’ve run away before.  I kinda do my own thing, you know?  Or I did.”

"I relocate ghosts," Bruce clarified softly, "to places where they’ll be safe … and the ones that don’t have anywhere to go?  I take them home with me."

She snorted: “You’re kidding.”

"Dick’s ten," he offered with a smile.  "Barbara’s thirteen.  Jason is fifteen, and Tim is twelve.  We think Cassie is eight."

He didn’t have pictures, because any ghosts captured on film were captured as they appeared at the moment of their death, and Bruce could not bear the broken bodies of his children.

"Dick doesn’t believe in walking like a normal person," he told her instead.  "He’d rather walk on his hands or con one of his siblings into carrying him.  Tim will fall for it every time."  Bruce grinned.  "They are the team-up from hell, or so Jason tells me.  Barbara, of course, is above such things, and I think Cassie eggs them all on when I’m not looking."

"Smart girls," the blonde observed quietly.

"Extremely.”

"Outnumbered."

"That too," Bruce agreed, trying to keep his bemusement from showing.  She didn’t know it yet, but the blonde had already decided to throw her lot in with him and the others.

Bruce couldn’t pursue the moment, however, as the determined physician returned for the umpteenth time to check on the status of his admittance paperwork.

The woman’s devotion was misplaced, but Bruce couldn’t exactly admit to his true reason for staking out her clinic.  Although if he delayed much further, Bruce suspected that the woman might just rip the paperwork out of his hands and drag him down the hall for medical attention anyway.

He ducked her gaze, and scrubbed at the back of his neck awkwardly.

“Sir,” she addressed him sternly.  “Do you have enemies or children?”

It wasn’t an odd question in this part of town, and taken by surprise, Bruce couldn’t help but chuckle.  “Six,” he reported ruefully, with a quick glance to his right.  It’s a gamble, but the teen was trying not to smile and his risk paid off in a surprising way.

The doctor also turned her gaze to the ghost next to him.  “Is that so, Stephanie?”

“Thinkin’ about it, Dr. Thompkins,” the teenager mumbled, her face turning crimson.  “Maybe?”

“Don’t look at me like that, young man,” Dr. Thompkins sniffed.

Bruce hadn’t realized that he was staring.

“It didn’t work for your mother and it will not work for you.  You have something of a reputation for the odd cases—do not disappoint me.”

The woman fished a make-up compact from her pocket, offering it to the girl.  “When you’ve made up your mind, Stephanie, get the man and his face-paint out of my clinic.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl— _Stephanie_ —snickered.


	7. Damian Wayne

The boy in the photograph did not smile, but his expression was triumphant nonetheless.  He had just won a major martial arts competition; Bruce didn’t know which kind.  He didn’t recognize the uniform.  He recognized the face.

Damian had his eyes, his nose, his ears, but not Bruce’s blood-type.

Bruce was not a compatible donor.  Even if he had been a compatible choice, Bruce wasn’t in time.  He got the second call within an hour of the first while the plane was still somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

Cessation of brain activity.  Given the severity of the injuries, organ failure was imminent.

Talia had told him not to bother continuing on, but Bruce wouldn’t turn back.  He asked them to run the tests anyway, and the results only confirmed what Bruce already knew.

He wasn’t a match.

Bruce could only sit at the bedside of a son that he hadn’t known existed and cradle a limp little hand in his, marveling at the difference in skin tone, the callouses where Bruce had none.

Across the bed, his ex-wife stroked the splinted fingers of Damian’s dominant hand.

Talia was too composed for Bruce’s taste, too reserved and too distant for him to approach.  There was only a scant meter between them, but it was a vast wasteland of everything unsaid for a decade.

Longer really.

Car accident, the nameless officials had told him, but Bruce didn’t quite believe them.  Not with Talia’s connections.  Not with Bruce’s money.  Not like this.

He would never know the truth.

Here, Bruce Wayne was no one, and Ra’s had already arrived to sweep the mess out of sight.  Politician and business man, religious leader and advisor, the man juggled the doctors, the reporters, Talia, and Bruce with ease.

Bruce had never liked Talia’s father, but Ra’s was the one to provide Bruce with the photograph.

It was an impossible comparison.  The boy in the hospital bed was barely visible under the bandages and the machines that delayed the inevitable.

Every hour, more and more were required to keep the illusion alive, but Talia would not allow them to be turned off.  Bruce was just relieved that he doesn’t have to make that choice.

This was all he had.

So Bruce held the little hand for what little time was left, and he tried to imagine the boy in the photograph over the boy in the bed.  Bruce had a hundred questions, but he did not ask his ex-wife.  She would not answer him.  Ra’s would not answer him.

Damian could not answer him.

Bruce pressed his lips to the back of his son’s hand.  He had done this before for Dick.  For Cassandra too.  Damian’s hand wasn’t like theirs.  It was warm.  “You can tell me anything,” he murmured as he had promised Barbara.  “I’ll listen.”

Talia only spared a brief sideways glance, but Bruce wasn’t talking to her and they continued to wait in silence until not even machines could hide the truth.

Bruce didn’t stay for the funeral.  He had not been invited.

He was tempted to ask for a memento.  Talia would have refused—she had never approved of his ‘collection’ as she put it—but Ra’s might have allowed it—a goodwill gesture.  Bruce had to discard the idea.  He had not known Damian, did not know what to ask for, and the boy’s quarters at the Embassy were as bland and impersonal as Talia’s.

Bruce left with only the wallet-sized photo of his unknown son’s victory in a sport he couldn’t even name, and he thought that would be the end of it.

Bruce actually fumbled shaving the first time that he spotted Damian in his bathroom mirror.

"Tt—I imagined you taller."

Bruce dropped the razor in the sink as he spun, but his grasping hands went right through Damian.

Startled, the boy recoiled.  There was no where to go, even in a billionaire’s bathroom and Damian fell through the half-open door.

Bruce scrambled after him, crouching to put himself at the child’s level.  He kept his hands to himself this time, and Damian unconsciously clutched Bruce’s cufflinks to his chest with eyes blown impossibly wide.

The silence was deafening.

Then Damian stood up straight.  His hands fell in tight fists at his sides, and his face went blank just like his mother’s did whenever an argument ceased to hold meaning and she went to that untouchable safe place where Bruce and Talia were happily married and forever-in-love.

"Dick!"

Bruce found his voice at last—sorry for the way that Damian flinched at the volume, but desperate to reach the little boy and provide some measure of comfort.

He would give anything to make Damian look a little less like Talia then, because that kind of strength was its own fragility.

"Dick!"

Bless his eldest’s heart—Dick didn’t bother with the locked bedroom door, but sailed straight through the panel.  He took in the situation at a glance and immediately barreled into Damian, turning the tackle into a hug at the last possible moment.

Damian staggered under the unexpected weight, and Dick took the opportunity to better his leech impersonation.  “You’re safe here,” Dick promised in a rush.  “You’re safe, Damian.  Please don’t freak out.”

Damian was completely speechless.  Dick took that for agreement.

His grip on Damian loosened, but only enough to make eye contact.  “You’re safe now,” the acrobat pledged earnestly.  “I’m Dick, that’s your dad, and we’re in Wayne Manor.”  Dick’s gaze turned soft.  “You made it, Damian.  You’re safe now.”

“I’m dead,” Damian countered tightly.

“But you’re not alone,” Bruce promised, crouching next to the boys.  He could feel Dick’s hair under one hand, the curve of his skull and the weight under the chill.  Damian was insubstantial under Bruce’s hand, but someday—someday soon—Bruce would be able to hold Damian the same way.  “I was late.  I’m sorry, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”


End file.
